Topics

Featured in Development

Peter Alvaro talks about the reasons one should engage in language design and why many of us would (or should) do something so perverse as to design a language that no one will ever use. He shares some of the extreme and sometimes obnoxious opinions that guided his design process.

Featured in AI, ML & Data Engineering

Today on The InfoQ Podcast, Wes talks with Katharine Jarmul about privacy and fairness in machine learning algorithms. Jarul discusses what’s meant by Ethical Machine Learning and some things to consider when working towards achieving fairness. Jarmul is the co-founder at KIProtect a machine learning security and privacy firm based in Germany and is one of the three keynote speakers at QCon.ai.

Featured in Culture & Methods

Organizations struggle to scale their agility. While every organization is different, common patterns explain the major challenges that most organizations face: organizational design, trying to copy others, “one-size-fits-all” scaling, scaling in siloes, and neglecting engineering practices. This article explains why, what to do about it, and how the three leading scaling frameworks compare.

Camille Fournier on Platform Engineering, Engineering Ladders, and Her Book “The Managers Path”

On the podcast this week Charles Humble talks to Camille Fournier about running a platform team, how her current role differs from the CTO role she had a Rent the Runway, the skills developers need to acquire as they move from engineering to management positions, trends like Holacracy, and her book "The Manager's Path".

Key Takeaways

When looking for platform engineers Camille looks for people who understand what it takes to build and run distributed systems - network, availability, data - and customer empathy.

The team needs to be focussed on taking the time do build robust software for operational excellence.

The technical skills were different at Rent the Runway - these would tend to be more full-stack engineers who worked in a more iterative way.

Much of what we do at work is really about human relationships. One thing about relationships is that they tend to be better when you have one on one conversations with people on our regular basis. A lot of the value of one on one meeting is that you are reenforcing the social connection you have with the other person.

One of the most important things we do as engineering managers is stay abreast of how to make teams effective in the context of delivering software.

08:40 At my current organisation, we really do have to care about operational excellence of the software that we’re building.

08:50 We’re building big foundational systems, and a lot of people rely on them - therefore, if they break, they have a big impact across the company.

09:00 That’s very different than if you are building a script by yourself to do some data analysis that no-one else depends on.

09:15 You need different skills to do those two things - if you are not really that interested in building robust software, you’re probably not going to enjoy the time to build great platform software.

09:35 If you are trying to build something scrappy and learn if something works and iterate to be happy, you’d be pretty unhappy if that was your day job.

09:50 I do think that most companies have different teams with different values in the work that they’re doing - and that’s the most important thing to align on.

10:50 At the end of day, a lot of work is about human relationships - there are some people who have a hard time with good working relationships.

11:00 That doesn’t have much to do with whether they like each other as people; sometimes it does, but some of the people I have liked the most as people have driven me the craziest in terms of working relationship.

11:15 I love the fact they are intellectually curious and we can have really deep discussions about interesting topics, but at work they do things that make me insane.

11:30 I have worked with plenty of people who I wouldn’t be close friends with outside of work, but some of the best work that I have done is because we get along and have complementary skills.

11:55 There are times when I see a manager who has to move people between teams a lot because those aren’t getting along with the manager is a little bit of a red flag.

12:10 If it happens once in a while there’s nothing wrong with that - but if it happens a lot, the problem may be that the manager is not being flexible enough or needs to resolve.

12:25 The kind of person who is going to be a great manager for a UI team is not necessarily going to be a great manager for a QA team.

12:35 There’s also a question of whether that manager is going to be able to work well with and lead effectively.

When you wrote The Manager’s Path did you feel there was a missing need for it?

13:35 I’m a pragmatic person, and I had been blogging on and off since I started managing a lot.

13:50 I felt what people were enjoying about my blogs were really the pragmatic aspects of management.

14:05 If you’re in a situation and you haven’t been there before, what do I do?

14:15 One of the things I’m pretty good at is categorising and finding patterns.

17:45 Part of the value is you are reinforcing the social connection with the other person.

18:10 For me, I also have observed over time, is that I get stressed out with people who I have a close working relationship whom I don’t have a one-on-one with.

18:20 If there’s any kind of conflict I get paranoid about whether if the person is mad with me or what are they thinking of.

18:40 Regular one on one conversations can ease that fear about their managers or other people they work with.

18:50 Fundamentally the most important things about one on ones is that they are a relationship management thing.

19:00 If you’re married, you want to spend some time with your spouse - whether you do date nights, or for five minutes before you go to sleep at night - the checking in is important in a relationship.

19:20 If you are a new manager, who often juggle management and some individual contribution responsibility.

19:30 New managers are often expected to write code and do some hands-on work.

19:35 That’s OK - juggling things can be painful for context switching, and it’s important to hammer home that it may not be fun or you may not be in the mood for the one on ones - but the worst thing you can do is neglect them.

20:00 When you neglect them, you miss things about people on the team, you miss building that relationship, you miss things you would actually catch earlier.

20:10 The most important thing about holding one on ones is that you hold them regularly, ideally at least every other week.

20:15 It’s very hard to go longer than that and maintain a good relationship - especially if it’s someone you’ve not been working with for a long time.

What led you to publish the engineering ladder [http://dresscode.renttherunway.com/blog/ladder]?

20:50 I published it because the way I wrote it was from backchannel help from friends.

21:05 I had feedback from friends who are CTOs at other companies and I took advantage of my network to help me create this ladder, along with my team at Rent the Runway.

21:25 After we created it, I realised that if you were a new leader who had never done this before, you maybe don’t have a strong HR team, and your team has a set of levels, where do you start?

21:55 I love to look at other people’s source code to get started - one of the great things about software is how much people share their work.

22:05 Taking someone else’s work and remixing it to make it work for your use case - or reading the code and getting ideas from it and doing your own thing.

22:20 There wasn’t anything out there for this essential piece of organisational work.

22:30 As an engineer (who is a big proponent of open source) I wanted to just publish this to give them a starting point.

22:35 We did a pretty good job, but it’s not perfect, but we thought about it and is the result of a couple of iterations.

22:45 If nothing else, it will give people a starting point and then a bunch of other people published their work.

22:55 Some of it are evolutions of the Rent the Runway ladder - and now if you’re starting out, and you want a career ladder for your engineering team, you have a lot of examples out there to learn from.

30:05 Whether you’re a manager or not, you might read this for both giving feedback and learning how to take feedback.

30:25 “High output management” is a favourite among engineering leaders - it has things I like and things I don’t but it’s a classic for good reason.

30:40 One thing I recommend to engineering managers is to stay abreast how to make teams effective in terms of delivering software.

31:00 That changes - one of the things I recommend is to follow how the trends of software development change, so your teams can be as effective as possible.

31:20 A book that came out recently “Accelerate” is all the research that she and her team has done on what makes development teams effective.

31:40 It covers things from how you do continuous deployment to how to structure change control, how do you do idea sharing on the team.

31:50 It is very useful to keep abreast of things that are going on in the cloud, because that changed how people wrote and deployed software, so if you don’t know about it then you may not be aware of the best practices of the day in making teams most effective.

More about our podcasts

You can keep up-to-date with the podcasts via our RSS Feed, and they are available via SoundCloud and iTunes. From this page you also have access to our recorded show notes. They all have clickable links that will take you directly to that part of the audio.